From Glamor Trams to Galactica: Terry Winnick on Building Universal Studios

Every Father's Day, I post something about my dad, Terry Winnick. This year, I'm sharing his voice.

In August 2014, not long before he passed away, my dad sat down for a two-hour interview with Jonathan Green, the son of his best friend Jerry Green and a contributor to Inside Universal. The two of them had been Universal Studios tour guides together back in the 1960s, and Jonathan wanted to capture the studio's history from someone who lived it.

My dad didn't just work at Universal. He helped build the Studio Tour. He started as a guide (employee #010, hired in July 1968), worked his way up to Executive Vice President of the tour, ran Universal's guided-tour operation at the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., helped launch Universal Studios Florida, and spent years designing the attractions themselves.

In this conversation, recalled almost entirely from memory, he traces the whole story: the 1964 origins (when the "tour" was really a way to sell more commissary lunches), the pink-and-white Glamor Trams, the empty sound stages, the Collapsing Bridge, Jaws, and the Battle of Galactica, the first ride to combine animatronics, lasers, and live actors, run by a computer hand-built in a garage. Along the way: Yosemite, Back to the Future, and the movie stars whose dressing rooms the trams rolled past.

It's history, but it's also just my dad, telling it the way only he could.

Recorded August 2014. My thanks to Jonathan Green for conducting and preserving this conversation, and to Inside Universal (insideuniversal.com).